In January 2015, I received an email from a colleague at the University of Minnesota asking me to serve as chair of expert panel charged with revising their Campus Religious and Spiritual Programs (CRSP) as part of the Council on the Advancement For Standards in Higher Education Board. I agreed with delight, and a team of individuals from across the country gathered to discuss and disseminate our conclusions.
Throughout the exploration of the standards, we began to recognize that the language used to frame these evaluations was based on one thing: religious practice. In the field that has come to be known as “interfaith work,” there are many non-theists, individuals who do not hold to a belief in a deity, many of which we know of today as atheists, agnostics, or secular humanists. In fact, among the team were a group of colleagues from the Secular Student Alliance, all of whom immediately became pivotal to the direction of our conversations. What emerged in those conversations was was a need to bring secular, humanist, and atheist identities under the umbrella of interfaith. We were able to pinpoint several universities in which the incorporation of these campus freethinker groups, as they were sometimes called, were of great benefit to the larger discussion. Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core had previously stated how these groups were an important contribution to this “interfaith” work and even individuals like Chris Stedman, author of Faitheist: How an Atheist found common ground with the Religious shared how non-religious individuals could benefit much from being a part of this work. Despite these recognitions, every discussion around incorporating their identity felt incomplete.
Often, there is posturing to incorporate these individuals into the discussion: “Yes, we know the language doesn’t quite fit but you’re better off under this umbrella than outside of it.” True, we want as many people involved as possible, but it should also be on as level a playing field as possible. Interfaith work was welcoming these atheists, humanists, and agnostics under the “tent”, but they weren’t really welcoming them into said tent in a way that properly recognized their identity. This can be seen in many dialogues and panels in which the principle dialogue is between faith traditions, oftentimes neglecting non-religious voices.
As these discussions continued, questions were finally asked: do the words “religious and spiritual” capture what we are seeing this field? Does the word Interfaith, or even Multifaith (a word I had been using heavily at the time, including in the title of a national research study I had run from 2013-2015). The answer was no, no, and more no. In fact, no word was encompassing. And one day, it hit me. Why are we trying to contain everything in one word, to force everyone into a single grammatical space? And so was born the beginning of a three word phrase that we believed would be encompassing.
When we shared it with the editorial team, the response was immediately positive. Sure, it was a little cumbersome to have “religious, secular, and spiritual,” but in the end, it was inclusive and reflected a sensitivity to identities. But we didn’t want to just put secular at the end of the statement (what would have been religious, spiritual, and secular) because we felt it would be of somewhat diminishing value. Secular was not meant to be an afterthought, or of less value, and thus, someone said, “Why don’t we just put the words in alphabetical order?” Brilliant!!!
Once settled, we embarked on a series of revisions in every place within the CRSP document we had been assigned to say a new phrase: religious, secular, and spiritual. We had redefined the document from CRSP, to CRSSP. And the editorial board even agreed with us! And from that moment, we decided that it was time for a change in the use of language in the field.
In the end, “religious, secular, and spiritual” is what Convergence uses. We have seen it used a few places, and sometimes have seen it in different forms (namely with secular at the end). It may feel like a verbose approach to “interfaith” work, but words matter; this team was experiencing that, and attempting to act in ways that acknowledged it. And those individuals, chaplains, campus ministers, and higher education professionals, many of whom are at the leading edge of the field, believe that the time has come for a new language, one which fully includes the population of individuals we believe deserve our support and encouragement to explore their identities. Religious, secular, and spiritual – we are all welcome under this newly defined umbrella.
